Plant in full sun in a moderately well drained soil and water occasionally to infrequently during summer and fall - fairly drought tolerant but plants grow larger and more luxurious with occasional irrigation. Bracts and leaves are tender to any prolonged temperatures below freezing but stems seem hardy down into the high 20's though the showy bracts in winter may be damaged by any early frosts, so best in near frost free coastal gardens.

Euphorbia pulcherrima is native to Central America from southern Mexico (Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Chiapas) and possibly further south into Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The name for the genus is derived from Euphorbus, the Greek physician of King Juba II of Numidia and later of Mauritania. In 12 B.C. King Juba named a cactus-like plant he found in the Atlas Mountains after his physician and later Carl Linnaeus assigned the name Euphorbia to the entire genus and the specific epithet 'pulcherrima' fittingly means "most beautiful'. The species was long cultivated by the Aztecs, who called it cuetlaxochitl and utilized the plant for decoration and extracted compounds from the bracts to be used as a dye and the white sap was used medicinally.

It was brought into its current usage as holiday decoration through the efforts of Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779 – 1851) an American physician who was appointed by President James Madison to be the US Minister to Mexico in 1825 (after 1886 this position was called Ambassador) and was later appointed Secretary of War by President Martin Van Buren. Poinsett was very much interested in scientific study and later co-founded the National Institute for the Promotion of Science and the Useful Arts, which later became known as the Smithsonian Institution. Poinsett maintained his own hothouses at his Greenville, South Carolina plantation and brought back and cultivated Euphorbia pulcherrima from Taxco del Alarcon in Guerrero after seeing it flourishing there when visiting the area in 1828. He later shared the plants with friends and botanic gardens, and it was not long before it was first introduced into cultivation commercially by Bartram Gardens, the company founded on the farm of John Bartram, the early American botanist, horticulturist and explorer that Carl Linnaeus one time called "greatest natural botanist in the world". Bartram’s Garden first exhibited the plant at a 1829 meeting of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society and by 1834 and the plant generally now known as Poinsettia, was then introduced into to Europe.

The 'St Louis Red' cultivar is an old shrubby form of the Poinsettia that grows well in the garden and flowering well in winter so as to add to the holiday spirit. We received this plant from Dylan Hannon, curator of the Huntington Botanic Garden Conservatory who noted that the accession records noted it only as an "old shrubby form" that they got from Paul Ecke around 1970 and they considered it a fine garden plant that bloomed reliably at Christmas when grow outdoors without any special treatment. We sent pictures of this plant to Ecke Ranch (now part of the Dutch flower conglomerate, Dümmen Orange) and Poinsettia breeder Ruth Kobayashi told is she believed the plant to be 'St Louis Red', an old variety that Paul Ecke once grew outdoors in Encinitas for cut flower use. According to the information archived that was on the United States Botanic Garden website, this variety was the poinsettia grown throughout the United States and Europe around 1920 and was first marketed as the St. Louis red poinsettia by Louis Bourdet of St. Louis, Missouri, in 1924 and it became the primary cultivar grown throughout the United States through the 1960s.. We thank Mimi Bourdet Otten for corresponding with us about her great grandfather Louis Bourdet, who she noted operated a large nursery in North St. Louis in the early years of the 20th century which her grandfather Andre Bourdet Sr. operated until the 1970s.

We grew this variety from 2018 until 2023. It is not the same variety that can be seen in the photo taken in December 2015 of the magnificent Poinsettia display along Camarillo Springs Rd in Camarillo (Ventura County) but it is similar and shows just how amazing a mass planting of large Poinsettia can look! 

The information displayed on this page about Euphorbia pulcherrima 'St Louis Red' is based on our research conducted about this plant from books in our nursery library as well as from information that is provided by reliable online resources. We also have included our own observations made about it as it grew in the nursery gardens and other gardens visited, as well how the crops of this plant performed in the containers when we had them in our nursery field. We also include comments received from others and welcome hearing from anyone who has information about this plant, particularly if it includes cultural information aiding others to better grow it.